Nations, Countries, and Nationalities

 Seen from space, the United States looks nothing like this. From the air (and especially from space) the states are not labeled, nor are they color coded and it is impossible to tell where Wyoming ends and Montana begins. The long, straight boundaries that delineate parts of every state except Hawaii are invisible and completely imaginary. They were drawn on maps and agreed to by politicians who might never have set foot on the land, and are often drawn for reasons having nothing to do with topography, the landscape, or the desires of the people who lived there.

But these lines matter, of course. Enormously. Drive across one state line into another and different laws apply. Different taxes are imposed. People root for different sports teams and eat different kinds of barbecue. They go to different schools and vote in different elections. Crossing a state boundary is a big deal. And crossing an international boundary is an even bigger deal, requiring official documents and inspections. For something completely invisible, boundaries are a big deal.

Political boundaries may be completely imaginary, but they determine the rights we enjoy, the laws we follow and the taxes we pay. They reflect one of the most powerful realities of human geography during the last five centuries—the division of the planet into sovereign states.

The vocabulary is important. Let’s start with a few ideas that are a lot less obvious than they seem.

This map of Africa reflects political boundaries. It shows the 54 independent states of Africa, along with much of Europe and the Middle East. Although the words “state” and “nation” are often used as if they meant the same thing (even in this text), they do not. When political scientists and geographers talk about a “state” they usually mean a place that has an effective government, political sovereignty, and independence. A nation refers to a group of people who share certain characteristics—a common language, a shared history and cultural identity, and, usually, a political organization. Not all nationalities are identified with a state. Depending on how one defines them, there are thousands of nationalities in the world and 197 sovereign, independent states.

The United States of America is made up, not of sovereign states (in spite of what the name implies) but of fifty semi-sovereign states. According to the US Constitution, each member state has certain powers that belong to that state’s government. State governments build highways and set traffic laws. They license drivers and physicians and teachers and barbers and people who want to get married. State governments have an enormous impact on the lives of the people who live in those states. But in the US, state powers are limited. States cannot mint coins or print money. They cannot declare war on their neighbors or establish relations with foreign countries. This division of power between state and national governments means that the United States has is a federal state.

Some states are divided into regions and provinces but the local governments retain almost all of their sovereign power. These are called confederations. The European Union—which isn’t exactly a state but acts a lot like one—is a confederation. States in which a central government governs the entire country are said to have unitary governments. England has a unitary government. Although England (which is not the same as Great Britain) is divided into 48 counties, Parliament governs the whole of England. County and local governments in England play important roles, but their powers are subordinate to Parliament. Among the individual states of the United States, county and municipal governments are also subordinate to the state governments. Cities and counties cannot create themselves, but must petition the state legislature in order to be permitted the limited powers of a city or county council.

Getting even deeper into the vocabulary, some states are defined as nation states because the vast majority of the citizenry shares the same national identity. Ireland and Poland are nation states.

Other states are made up of multiple nationalities and are referred to as multinational states. In both cases, historical and political forces have usually gone into setting the boundaries and determining the national identities of the people who live there.

Great Britain, whose citizens identify themselves as English, Welsh, Scots, Irish, and Cornish, among others, is a multi-national state. This multiplicity of national identities within a single state can create tensions and conflicts that can lead to devolution. This happened peacefully in the United Kingdom in 1997 when Scotland held a referendum calling for a devolution of powers from the British Parliament to the Scottish Parliament. This was approved by the British Parliament in the Scotland Act of 1998. Not only did the Scottish Parliament receive more direct powers in the government of Scotland, but the ancient symbol of Scottish sovereignty, the Stone of Scone, was returned to Scotland from Westminster Cathedral where it had been part of the British Coronation Throne since 1296. The Stone was temporarily returned to Westminster Cathedral in 2023 so that it could play its traditional role in the coronation of King Charles III.

This map of Africa highlights the idea of a state as a place. Before the period of European exploration and colonialism, African society was divided into numerous kingdoms and tribal communities. Africans spoke hundreds of languages but, with only a few exceptions, the European idea of a sovereign state with recognized borders had little meaning.

This changed drastically in 1884 when a group of European diplomats gathered in Berlin to decide how best to divide up Africa among their governments. The details are complex, but essentially, the resulting Berlin Treaty allowed European states to lay claim to regions of Africa in which they had established a presence. Boundaries would be drawn in consultation with other European governments in such a way as to avoid fighting. No attention was paid to natural boundaries (such as rivers and mountain ranges), nor the to the ethnic and tribal identities of the people living there. The only countries in Africa able to retain their independence were the ancient (and Christian) kingdom of Ethiopia, and the modern Republic of Liberia, which had been settled by formerly enslaved people from the United States and seen as something of an American colony by the European diplomats. The resulting Scramble for Africa produced the basis for the modern, post-colonial map posted below.

The Republic of South Africa, for example, is a country at the southern tip of Africa. South Africa was a colony of Great Britain from 1804 until 1931 (when it became a sovereign member of the British Commonwealth). It became a fully independent Republic in 1961. Everyone born in South Africa is considered to have South African citizenship. South Africa is a member of the United Nations and the African Union. South African athletes compete in the Olympics under the South African flag. South African Footballers (or soccer players, as we call them in the United States) compete for South Africa in the FIFA World Cup. South African police and military forces protect the peace. The South African Parliament makes the laws. South African judges interpret those laws, and the South African President carries them out.

But South Africa is not a nation. Rather, it is a sovereign state that it is made up of multiple nationalities and national identities. Among the native peoples of South Africa are the Bantu speaking Xhosa and Zulu and several groups of Khoisan-speaking people, many of whom continue to live as hunter-gatherers. In addition, descendants of Dutch settlers (who speak Afrikaans), English settlers (who speak English), and settlers from India (who also speak English) play important roles in South African society. South Africa is, like many countries of the world, a multi-national state. Though South African citizens share a political identity as South Africans, they speak different languages, have different historical experiences, and different ways of organizing their communities and their lives.

A nation is made up of people who share a common culture, but who may or may not be identified with a single sovereign country. There is no single marker of a nationality, but we might expect that people who share the same national identity probably speak the national language. They may share a common religion, celebrate the same national holidays, and might even wear the same kinds of clothes, especially on formal occasions. More importantly, they share the same history. But they may not live anywhere near their national homeland.

Nationalism is a set of beliefs that puts strict boundaries around who gets to belong to the nation and who does not. To a nationalist, membership in one nation or the other is central to his or her identity—far more so than simple citizenship in a state. The First World War (and many other wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were rooted in conflicts over nationalism.

Many nationalities are identified with a single country or nation-state. . Almost everyone living in Ireland is Irish, and most of the citizens of Poland are Polish. A substantial majority of the people living in a nation-state share the same nationality, whether Polish, Greek, or Irish. But with almost no exceptions, nation-states, like multi-national states, are home to minority nationalities. In Spain, with a population of 46.7 million people, members of the Catalan minority account for 7 million people, Basques number 1.2 million, and Roma (or Gypsies) number 176,000. And it is not as if these minorities simply showed up last week. The Basque and Catalan languages are among the most ancient in Europe. These nationalities were there long before Spanish existed as a thing someone could be. Bosnia, however, is home to a mix of nationalities—Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian, a mixture that led to conflicts throughout the Twentieth century.

The idea of a state as a self-governing political unit is relatively modern and originated in Europe. During the Middle Ages, various kings and princes had sovereignty over a region—possessing the right to rule—based usually on their ancestry. Medieval France belonged to the kings of France and they were expected to pass that right to their male heirs. When a king died, the announcement would be made to the people, “The King is Dead.” But, in the next breath the words would be spoken, “Long live the King.” When a king died, he was replaced immediately by a son, nephew, brother or cousin—whomever had the best claim on the throne. Coronations and other ceremonies came later. Though kings relied on tradition and charisma in order to govern, they were the sole source of law and justice. If, in 1700 you asked a Frenchman what he was, he would certainly say, “I am a subject of His Majesty, King Louis XIV.”

But if you were to ask his grandchildren a century later, they would almost certainly respond, “I'm French. I am a citizen of France.” Somewhere in that century, the idea of the nation-state was born. Even though many countries in Europe retained monarchies, the people increasingly saw themselves as part of a nation with a national identity rather than as subjects of a monarch. This essentially European idea of the nation-state spread throughout the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries until, by the end of the Twentieth Century, virtually all of the land on earth—with some important exceptions—were identified as sovereign territory. The exceptions are important. Greenland, though self-governing, is part of Denmark’s overseas territory. Antarctica is governed by international treaty rather than a single sovereign country. Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and Guam are territories (essentially colonies), of the United States.

In the United States, most citizens, if asked for their nationality, would proudly say, “American.” But it is possible to be a patriotic American and still identify with a different nationality. The US Government recognizes 561 Native American Tribes, ranging from the Navajo, Cherokee and Sioux with thousands of members and sprawling reservations, to much smaller tribes such as the Augustine Band of Cahuilla Indians in Coachella, California with eight members. Canada recognizes 634 “First Nations,” not including the Inuit people of the Arctic whose history and culture are very different from the native people in the rest of North America.

It is virtually impossible to count all of the nationalities in the world. They number in the thousands and there are often significant disputes over whether one group qualifies as a nation.

There are 197 countries in the world that possess relatively effective governments, political sovereignty, and independence and thus qualify for membership in the United Nations. At the beginning of the Twentieth century, only about thirty countries could claim independence and sovereignty. Almost all of Africa (except for Ethiopia and Liberia) had been colonized by Belgium, Britain, France, Italy, Portugal, and Germany. Central and Eastern Europe and most of the Middle East were ruled by one of four empires: The Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian, and the Pacific had been divided among Europe’s seafaring powers. Great Britain, the greatest imperial power of the modern era, had an empire on which, they liked to claim, the sun never set.

At the end of World War II, almost all of the countries and nationalities that had been under imperial rule began to declare (and sometimes fight for) their independence. The Philippines became independent from the United States in 1946. India and Pakistan declared their independence from Great Britain in 1947. By the end of the 1970s, all of Africa had ended its dependence on European colonial powers.

This did not mean that imperialism had come to a complete end. Many Caribbean and Pacific islands retained their colonial status (such as Puerto Rico and American Samoa). And some newly independent countries were made up of nationalities and regions that wanted to be independent from the new country to which they had been assigned by their former colonial rulers. The Republic of Sudan, for example, became independent from Great Britain in 1956, but almost immediately, the vast country (the largest in Africa) was divided between the Arabic-speaking, Islamic north and the largely Christian and animist south. Only after decades of warfare did South Sudan win its independence in 2011.

When a large part of a nation have made their homes far from their ancestral homeland while retaining their national identities, they are living in diaspora. The term means, in the original Greek, the scattering of seeds—as when a farmer scatters seeds over a prepared field. It was originally applied to the Jews who, beginning with the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century BCE, were forced out of their homeland and scattered far and wide. In the First Century CE, Jews were again forced to leave the land that had once been ancient Israel. As a result, by the Middle Ages, Jewish communities could be found from Spain in the West to Persia, Russia, and North Africa. Even after the modern state of Israel was established in 1948, about as many Jews live in the United States (i.e, as part of the Jewish Diaspora) as live in Israel.

Other nationalities with large diaspora communities include Polish, Irish, Mexican, Caribbean, African, and Indian. In many places, diasporas were created by persecution, war, poverty, or the threat of starvation. The most famous modern diasporas include the Irish, which was caused by the Great Famine (which was itself caused by British indifference to the potato blight in the late 1840s), and the African Diaspora, which was driven largely by the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of Africans in the centuries after Columbus and before the abolition of the slave trade in the nineteenth century.

National Minorities

A national minority includes an identifiable ethnic community that is substantially outnumbered by the national majority. In a multi-national state, the groups that make up the member nationalities are usually more or less balanced (though one nationality may enjoy more power and status than others). In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for example, Germans (held most of the power and wealth even though they were outnumbered by the empires many other nationalities). And, sometimes a group can be a minority in one country and a majority in another. In Romania, Hungarians and Germans are far outnumbered by ethnic Romanians, while in Germany and Hungary, Romanians are in the minority.

Many minorities are persecuted, none more so than the Roma who are in the majority nowhere. They appeared in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. The Roma originated in India, where they suffered persecution and poverty at the bottom of the caste system, and had lived a somewhat nomadic existence before appearing in Europe in the 1500s. Unable to find land on which to settle, many became traveling craftspeople, living in horse drawn wagons, moving in caravans from one village to the next, making their livings by repairing copper kettles, training and breeding horses, providing agricultural labor and, on occasion, performing magic tricks and reading palms. Because they were thought to have come from Egypt, they became known in England as “Gypsies.” Their name for themselves, Roma, means “human being” or , “one of us.” Among the Roma, anyone who is not “one of us” is a gadjo. Roma are among the most persecuted minority communities in Europe (which given Europe’s history of persecution of minorities, is saying something). During the Second World War, about 25 percent (or one million individuals) of Europe’s Roma population was murdered in an act of genocide called, in Roma, the Porajmos. Discrimination against Roma in education, employment, and housing continues today.

Microstates

For reasons of historical accident, political convenience, or diplomatic necessity, a few sovereign countries exist on very tiny plots of land—more the size of a town or village than a “real” country. The Principality of Monaco, for example, has 38 thousand residents who live on a slice of land on the French Riviera that is .762 square mile. With the size and population of a small town, Monaco holds membership in the United Nations and exercises all of the prerogatives of a sovereign state (except that it has no military). Vatican City (121 acres and a population of 825), is completely sovereign as well, but it has only observer status (without a vote) at the United Nations.